Kallman: Eight million New Yorkers called him ‘Marvelous Marv’
From SABR member Jeff Kallman at Throneberry Fields Forever on March 5, 2019:
Long enough after his baseball life ended, he carried a distinctive business card at the trucking company where he then worked in his native Tennessee. It was a foldover card, the inside of which showed his name, his contact information, and a once-familiar mug shot of himself in a Mets uniform. The top featured a trimmed oval cutout to show the mugshot below, an embossed sentence straight across the bottom saying it simply enough:
EIGHT MILLION NEW YORKERS CALLED HIM MARVELOUS MARV.
Marv Throneberry was the unlikeliest star on baseball’s unlikeliest team, after the Original Mets acquired him early in the 1962 season, becoming a Met in the first place because beloved Brooklyn veteran Gil Hodges went down with a knee injury, and the Mets were slightly desperate to put someone, anyone at first base with a blood count and a little long ball power who might be an improvement over anyone else on hand.
They had no clue that this once-glittering-enough Yankee prospect, who’d terrorized the AAA American Association with his home runs but couldn’t crack a Yankee lineup in which incumbent Moose Skowron owned first base with everything short of legal documents, would become so typical an Original Met that he’d replace the boos he got in his early days succeeding Hodges to the kind of cheering the Beatles would inspire two years later.
Read the full article here: https://throneberryfields.com/2019/03/05/eight-million-new-yorkers-called-him-marvelous-marv/
Originally published: March 5, 2019. Last Updated: March 5, 2019.